Consequences of avoiding important discussions such as end-of-life decision-making, results in such conversations having to occur in the hospital setting during a real-time crisis. This has the potential to result in an increased length of stay, inpatient mortality (low expected rates), and 30-day readmission rates. More importantly, it is a missed opportunity to improve the quality of both care and life by empowering patients and their families to navigate through serious illness.

Adventist Health has a goal to increase the incidence of ambulatory providers of proactively educating and engaging their patients and family members in this important discussion, as well as facilitating the electronic capture of their end-of-life wishes. To accomplish this, Adventist Health automated an alert for patients that qualify for POLST. This automated workflow allows patients and providers to display qualifying patients, access the POLST or declination form, and adds an analytics dashboard to track POLST capture performance.

Learning Objectives

During this session, Rakhal M. Reddy, MD, System Medical Director, Adventist Health will discuss:

• Understand how integrated systems facilitate provider and patient care experiences
• Understand how the HIMSS maturity model helps health systems understand and share how they leverage existing technologies to drive outcomes
• Care transformation and facilitating best practice through an integrated system
• Discover how to facilitate end-of-life discussions via an EHR add-on that identifies and allows for easier workflow among the POLST-qualified patient population

*This presentation was originally recorded and shared by HIMSS